How Good Content Management Can Help in Sales Enablement

Email address:

Connect with Author

Indrajeet is a Marketing professional with 6+ years of experience in managing different facets of Digital Marketing. After working with SpiderG - a Pune based SaaS startup, he is now ready to work as a freelance marketer with different SaaS startups helping them with marketing strategy, plan and execution. His love for old-school hard rock and metal music culminated in taking up guitar and starting www.guitargabble.com.

He’s studying Stoic philosophy, experimenting with productive habits and documenting the progress. Get in touch if you’re keen to know how you can implement pro-wrestling tactics in your marketing, community building and storytelling.

A recent survey found that sales reps, on an average, spend five working days per month searching for relevant information. Let’s look at how good content management can help in sales enablement.

In the fast-paced B2B working environment, you’ll often find the sales department strapped for time and working at a frenzied pace. But being busy doesn’t always mean being productive. A lot of time is spent just on gathering relevant information, and this leads to a sharp dip in productivity. Aberdeen found out that sales reps spend around 43 hours every month searching for information. That’s a staggeringly high amount of time!

AN UNMISSABLE GUIDE TO CHOOSING THE RIGHT KAM ENABLEMENT PARTNER

Key Accounts are complex, global behemoths. The old ways of managing them just won’t do.

Effective organizations have incorporated a new process in their workflow that lets their sales team work at a fast pace but without any hassles, as mentioned earlier. That process is sales enablement. According to CSO Insights, 60% of companies now have a dedicated sales enablement function.

Sales enablement is a collaborative effort of sales, marketing, and product departments. And to facilitate this effort, organizations have introduced a new role — the sales enablement professional. Along with acting as a liaison among sales and marketing teams, the sales enablement professional is also responsible for developing sales content, talent onboarding material, and training programs, managing CMS, CRM, and sales enablement platform, optimizing the buyer journey and analyzing the sales performance to improve the process.

The Role of Content Management in Sales Enablement

Considering the scale of content marketing, we can classify sales enablement as a part of content marketing, and to follow sales enablement best practices, your content marketing strategy should prioritize following content categories for sales enablement:

The scope of content marketing invites its own set of challenges, such as using stand-alone tools to perform sales and marketing activities instead of using a marketing automation tool, or the lack of a stable content repository. These practices adversely affect sales productivity and revenue.

However, sales enablement software can help you with content management in an effective manner. Let’s look at how good content management can help in sales enablement.

1. Improves Productivity

When the content is not maintained in a centralized repository, things get complicated for salespeople. Many organizations use different tools or platforms to keep different types of content. Sales reps must go through these various tools to find what they’re looking for, taking up plenty of time in the process which could otherwise be spent productively.

2. Nurtures Leads

Someone just downloaded a PDF guide that you recently released. Although the lead hasn’t shown any interest in buying from you yet, you need to stay on top of their minds. With the help of a content management platform, you can send the right content at the right time to your leads and prospects.

As Steve Jobs once said, “A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” You need to keep sending out content to your leads during the lead nurturing process before they start looking for it. Sending highly personalized content based on the stage of the funnel and the profile will guide the lead through the funnel and when the right time comes, making the sell is just a walk in the park.

3. Makes Easy Availability of Content to Sales People

According to Michael Brenner, CEO, Marketing Insider Group, 60-70% of content doesn’t get utilized at all. A similar phenomenon is also noticed with salespeople as well. Most of the time, sellers cling on to a product or content because it has become their comfort zone. Due to information overload, it’s just impossible for them to contain the information that is being generated today. That’s why the phrase ‘out of sight, out of mind’ is so relevant in the age of web 2.0.

A sales management tool can bring all the information in one place making it easy for salespeople to find relevant details. And as the organization expands its product range or adds new features to its existing products, it wouldn’t pose a problem as all the required information is just a few clicks away.

4. Enhances Sales Enablement Efforts

Content is just one piece of the sales enablement puzzle. As described, sales enablement also consists of other functions such as talent onboarding, training, buyer/journey funnel optimization, managing platforms and so on.

5. Tracks Content Metrics

Marketing and sales are highly data-driven. Every decision you take is supported by what worked or didn’t work in the past. A content management platform allows the sales enablement manager to track various content metrics. Metrics such as views, shares, downloads, average time spent, etc. and how the content has contributed to acquiring new customers. Based on these metrics, sellers can decide the further course of sales enablement strategy.